Johns 2009

The Invention of Piracy

"Precisely when authorship took on a mantle of public authority, through the crafts of the printed book, its violation came to be seen as paramount transgression -- as an offense against the common good akin to the crime of the brigand, bandit, or pirate." (19)

medieval distinction between liberal and mechanical arts

• Renaissance broke down these barriers; craft guilds with intellectual pursuits

pirate: use arose in English Revolution; previously, Donne had referred to antiquarian plagiarists as "wit-pyrats" (1611) (23), but

Stationers' Company:

• SC could come look around printing houses for quality control
• printing literally done in house by regulation -- domestic moral authority; pirated printing was done outside the house, in "holes" or "corners"
• author and reader had no role (27)

Stationers' Register vs. Crown (privileges and patents)

• 1624: Monopolies Act by Parliament; Crown could only issue patents for activities under its authority (like gunpowder) or where no trade already existed in the realm
• thought to mark the origin of Anglo-American intellectual property; but "in context, its real target was this proliferation of Crown intervention in the realm's everyday commercial conduct" (28)

English Civil War

• regulation out the window
• Milton's Areopagitica, Gerrard Winstanley's pamphlets

restored Charles II "therefore viewed popular print with a queasy mixture of respect, unease, and fear" (30); "how to accommodate and exploit what was becoming a perpetual sphere of printed argument, in which the rules of knowledge were no longer those of university, court or palace" (30)

Richard Atkyns: claimed he was heir to lucrative patent on printing common law books, originally granted by Elizabeth I

• SC challenged; some law books were already on the register from the Restoration era
• Atkyns claimed book trade was responsible for Civil War; had to be taken over by gentlemen granted privileges from the crown
• wanted Charles II to take over the printing press as property of the Crown;
• rewrote a history of printing in England, such that it began as "an appendage of royal power" rather than private enterprise (33)
• says the body (the trade) forgot/cut off the head (the Crown) (33)
• likened printing patents to royal land grants -- Crown still owned land, but people oversaw it, kept people from poaching the deer (34)

piracy